In traditional network flow management systems, network flows have been identified based on known protocol types. For example, such network flows are often classified based on known good and known bad protocols, for management purposes. However, identifying network flows based merely on known good and known bad protocols has generally exhibited various limitations. Just by way of example, identifying network flows based on known good and known bad protocols is sometimes ineffective in managing network flows in peer-to-peer systems. This has occasionally been because peer-to-peer systems deploy various levels of protocol obfuscations, encryption, and other advanced stealth techniques specifically to evade firewalls and network traffic shaping devices from classifying them as known bad. Given the lack of traffic-shaping of these file-sharing protocols, a large fraction of the network bandwidth, in an enterprise or ISP environment, is consumed by these obscure protocols.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.